A few years ago, the American Planning Association highlighted Portland’s Commercial Street, which runs alongside the harbor from Merrill’s Marine Terminal in the west to the Old Port district in the east, as one of America’s “Great Streets.”. On the inland side of the street are a typically downtown mix of vegan bakeries and high-end tailor shops, offices and hotels: a vibrant and varied mix, but not all that much different from the rest of downtown Portland.

But on the other, waterfront side of Commercial Street there are fish processing facilities, chandleries, and lobster pounds, and a couple (relatively) inexpensive seafood dives. This is the city’s legendary “working waterfront,” where some of the city’s most valuable real estate — with downtown proximity and stunning harborfront views — has been set aside for low-rent marine industries like boat repair, fishing, and seafood processing.

Over the years, lots of developers have wanted to displace Portland’s lobster boats with condos and hotels, which, they promised, could have brought dozens of millionaires downtown and pumped new tax revenue into City Hall.

Instead, the city has repeatedly made it clear that new development that’s incompatible with marine industries is not welcome here. While policies have evolved over the years, the goals remain the same: to preserve affordable berths for working vessels, and affordable workspace and warehouses for the businesses that support them.

As a result, we don’t have gated communities on our harborfront. And contrary to the rueful promises of the slick tanning booth enthusiasts who tried to build luxury hotels and apartments on the water, our economy really hasn’t suffered for it.

Quite the contrary: because the waterfront is still a place where people can find hard work, and lobster boats, and great seafood fresh off the boat, the city as a whole is much richer. I was reminded of the working waterfront’s value once again last week, when the Chicago Tribune ran a travel piece about Portland that highlighted our “still-working waterfront where gulls squawk and circle overhead.” The article continues:

“It’s not so difficult to have that old charm when your town’s engine is what it was when founded in 1786: the docks. Portland’s long, salty docks still teem with stacks of lobster traps, the hulking ships that catch the nation’s seafood, and businesses boasting, ‘Fishing Maine waters for over 100 years.’ They’re open and free for your perusal and offer classic no-frills dining spots such as J’s Oyster, which serves fish straight out of the ocean and appears to have been redecorated approximately never during its 36-year existence.”

The working waterfront makes Portland unique: it makes our city worth visiting, and it enriches the lives of everyone who lives here. Here, in the heart of our city, is a place that attracts visitors and residents alike to engage with and appreciate the value of our oceans, and the people who work them. The working waterfront is a pure and authentic expression of our city’s hardworking, egalitarian spirit.

Photo: Hobson’s Wharf, by Flickr user Timothy Valentine.

At the turn of the millennium, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, which observed that a successful community relies on successful community organizations and civic participation. “Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities,” Putnam wrote.

It’s hard to argue with that. But Putnam also took the view that, because Americans in general were becoming less and less active in organizations like the Rotary and bowling leagues (hence the title), our nation’s civic life was on the wane — making our communities more vulnerable to social and economic ills.

I don’t really share Putnam’s pessimism — even if bowling leagues and Rotary clubs aren’t as popular anymore, I’m confident that Americans are finding new ways to engage with their communities. Then again, I say that from my privileged position as a resident of Portland, which is a community of remarkably accessible civic institutions.

Almost immediately after I moved here, nearly six years ago now, I joined the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and started a blog dedicated to improving the city’s built environment. That, in turn, introduced me to people who helped me land my first full-time job here, and it put me on (usually) friendly terms with people from City Hall and various environmental organizations.

It’s not unusual for me to see our congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, out on the First Friday Art Walk, or to have a quick chat with one of my state legislators at the farmers’ market or the coffee shop. But easy access to local elected officials is only a small part of Portland’s civic life. The city has an abundance of volunteer committees and organizations that are dedicated to improving the city’s economy, environment, and the quality of life for its residents, from trade-oriented networking organizations to advocacy groups to social clubs.

Here’s a (very) incomplete bullet list of ready-made networks that are ready to make a newcomer feel at home, by empowering them to improve our community:

• The League of Young Voters – whose “Portland 101” series introduces people (of any age) to the workings of municipal government.
• The Telling Room – the volunteers at this nonprofit include many of Portland’s writers and journalists.
• SPACE Gallery – sign up as a volunteer to meet new buddies in Portland’s music and visual arts scenes (and get free admission to shows).
• AIGA Maine – this is a good network of Maine-based graphic designers and freelancers. They also put on periodic events, from cocktail hours to business seminars.
• Portland Society of Architects – for anyone in the building or design trades. Don’t miss their next Drink ‘n Crit.
• The City of Portland Boards and Committees – which offers up unpaid but influential positions in municipal Boards of Commissioners and Task Forces (including the Historic Preservation Board, the Public Art Committee, the Land Bank Commission, and many others). Check for vacancies here around the beginning of each month.
• League Night at Bayside Bowl – it may sound frivolous, but (like most of these groups) Bayside Bowl mixes good times with good citizenship: the owners are a state senator and a former ACLU attorney, and they host a nonprofit benefit night every Monday. Robert Putnam would feel right at home.

Photo: City Hall, by Corey Templeton. You can find many more photos of Portland on Corey’s Portland Daily Photo blog.

Portland is a really peaceful city, that’s true. But it turns out that of all the States in the U.S., Maine is the most peaceful. I don’t mean most yoga studios or spas per capita, though we have plenty of those. I mean peace as in the absence of violence.

For two years in a row, The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) has ranked Maine at the top of their United States Peace Index. And if Maine were a country unto itself (which it feels like sometimes) it would rank fifth on the IEP’s Global Peace Index. To see how striking this is, consider that the U.S. as a whole ranks 82nd out of 153 countries!

The IEP “is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress,” according to the full report on the rankings. “The second annual edition of the index, produced by Institute for Economics and Peace, provides a comprehensive analysis of peacefulness at the state and city levels, as well as an analysis of the costs associated with violence and the socio-economic measures associated with peace,” explains the report. “The USPI measures peacefulness according to five indicators: the number of homicides, number of violent crimes, the incarceration rate, number of police employees and the availability of small arms.”

Our neighbors Vermont and New Hampshire rank right behind us, and Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA was ranked the most peaceful of all major U.S. metro areas (Portland was not rated independent of Maine). And, as you can see on the map above, New England is the country’s most peaceful region.

Although Maine as a whole has some significant socio-economic challenges, we all feel the positive effect of the lack of violent crime, the social ease of not requiring large police forces and the commitment to self-improvement that comes along with low incarceration rates.

So when people wonder what they can do to make the world a better, more peaceful place, one of the answers is, be more like Maine!

A mild winter and warm spring means that the city’s fruit trees are blossoming, and the farmers on the outskirts of the city have been hard at work preparing seedlings in their greenhouses. In two more weekends, the indoor farmer’s market will close for the season. Meanwhile, an increasing number of farmers have begun setting up their tables again in Deering Oaks Park (Saturdays, 7 am to noon, beginning on April 28) and in Monument Square (Wednesdays, 7 am to 1 pm).

Since we moved to Maine a few years ago, my wife and I have bartered work for vegetables with our friends at the Snell Family Farm, which has been growing fruit and vegetables in Bar Mills for four generations.

I came to know the Snells by going to high school with their oldest daughter. But working for them at the Saturday farmers’ market, I’ve come to meet some of their hundreds of customers, many of whom have been buying from the Snells for many years. They swap jokes and planting advice and recipes. It strikes me as an unusually personable relationship between a small business and their customers. And it’s by no means unique to the Snell Family Farm: I see similar interactions happening at virtually every booth in the market. Eating is a social activity, and good food has a way of solidifying good relationships.

So because Portlanders care so much about good food, they also care a great deal about the people who provide the raw ingredients. For decades, the city has taken pride in the working waterfront that supplied the city’s seafoods; now, there’s a growing pride associated with the fields of Portland’s working hinterlands.

Vestiges of yankee frugality and self-reliance helped these small businesses squeak through through the decades of globalization and corporate agribusiness. But to explain these enterprises’ current success, more credit is due to a new, post-globalization desire (both among Portlanders, and among the people who choose to move to Portland) to have a closer and more honest relationship with the natural resources we rely on.

Local restaurants — from fine-dining establishments to taquerias to comfort-food diners — prominently list their farmers on their menus, and the farmers markets themselves have been attracting increasing numbers of customers over the past decade. Farmers are collaborating with chefs on equal footing in the city’s increasingly serious food culture.

This week, while we wait for the last threats of frost to fade away and planting season to begin in earnest, SPACE Gallery is hosting their annual Food+Farm series, a collection of programs that highlight and celebrate local foods and farmers. Highlights this year include a screening of The Harvest / La Cosecha, a documentary about child migrant farm workers, a “Grow Fair” with events and workshops for gardeners, and a presentation from Daniel Klein, the producer of the Perennial Plate webseries.

Photo: Urban Farm Fermentory’s window installation at SPACE Gallery. Photo by Christian MilNeil.

Once again, Portland is hosting Blue Wrap Project Runway, perhaps the world’s only fashion show combining surgical supplies and designer gowns. Considering the correlation of doctors and designers in this town, it’s no wonder this fundraiser has taken hold here.

At this annual event, local designers use blue wrap to create elegant and/or silly dresses, hats, scarves, bags, parkas, all of it inspired by, and a dead ringer for, couturier fashions. And what is blue wrap? It’s the colored plastic material that every hospital in the world uses a ton of, primarily for sterilizing and wrapping surgical instruments.

Along comes Partners for World Health. Based in suburban Scarborough, Maine, this nonprofit takes useful medical supplies that U.S. hospitals have to discard because of government regulations, and they distribute them to organizations and people around the world. That means bandages, syringes, tape, gauze, catheter supplies, soap, alcohol swabs—and, yes, blue wrap. And it was Partners for World Health who came up with the idea of a benefit evening in which blue wrap is used to create designer clothing…all for a good cause. (Last year, the fashions also landed at the Portland Public Library for a public show. You can see photos of last year’s event here.)

The event kicks off at 6:00 pm on Thursday, April 26^th, at the University of Southern Maine’s Hannaford Hall, with proceeds benefitting Partners for World Health. So ask yourself:  how often can I attend an haute couture show where everything is made from blue wrap, and where the cost of my ticket helps to send medical supplies around the world? Odds are, the answer is “not very often.” There is a reception for supporters of Partners for World Health at 6pm followed by a video presentation and fashion show at 7:15pm. Tickets are $50 per person in advance, $60 at the door; Student Ticket $25 and $35 at the door. You can reserve tickets by calling 885-1011.

This is one of those occasions where Portland’s diverse creative talents collide in a shower of creative energy. Blue wrap + fashion show + you = An unforgettable evening.

Happy is the city with great architecture. In Portland, that happy list includes the brick edifices along Commercial Street, the varied homes of the West End, the Wishcamper and Abromson buildings at USM, the Observatory, the Victorian houses perched in Deering Highlands, the Art Museum – an embarrassment of riches.

Happy, too, is the city, with great architects. In Portland, we have long supported significant architects, going back to the 19^th Century, with Francis Fassett and John Calvin Stephens and Frederick Law Olmsted (what, you didn’t know? After New York’s Central Park, Olmsted designed Deering Oaks).

Today, the hundreds of members of the Portland Society of Architects (PSA) encourage “…innovation and vision in design and planning” throughout the city. The PSA offers a wealth of programs, from the “Unbuilt Design Awards” to “10 Minute Architect” (a free clinic for anyone thinking about whether they need an architect) to last year’s Symposium on Sea Level Rise and the biannual “Drink’n Crit.”

What is “Drink’n Crit”?  Twice a year, the PSA recreates the student experience of an architectural studio. Only this time around, the students are local professionals who, with some trepidation, present their current projects to the public, as well as a critical review by fellow architects. Unlike an actual charette in architecture school, this event does not involve pulling an all-nighter!

The most recent Drink’n Crit was on March 12^th, at the SPACE Gallery on Congress Street. As guests milled about, talked, and had a beer, four architectural teams were taping drawings and photos of their projects on the walls. The team of jurors was introduced and then, one by one, each team presented its project and listened to the critiques.

The crowd may have been most energized by the team working with the City of Portland to re-imagine the several blocks of Spring Street that bisect much of downtown, past the Holiday Inn and the Civic Center.  Should Spring Street be two lanes wide, instead of four? Become a “bicycle boulevard”? Foster new garden spaces and stairways leading off to other streets?

The suggestions flew fast and furious, and the give-and-take was emblematic of the best of Portland. Some of us worked for the city, some of us worked in the city, some of us lived in the city – but all of us cared deeply about the city, wanting it always to be a better place.

If you, too, want to weigh in on Portland’s built landscape, Greater Portland Landmarks and Maine Historical Society are co-hosting a series of panel discussions about specific streets and spaces demanding our attention (including Spring Street, and our bridges, and our waterfront). Step up to the microphone and state your opinion!

Commercial Street and Wishcamper Center, University of Sourthern Maine, photos by Corey Templeton

Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin went through two years’ worth of business planning, real estate hunting, and city permitting so that dozens of other entrepreneurs won’t have to. Their enterprise, the Portland Flea-for-All, is about to open its doors in 3 stories of a gorgeously wood-beamed former mattress factory in the heart of Bayside.

The Flea-for-All is a flea market for Portland’s craftspeople, yard sale recyclers, and other creators. When it opens for business on the weekend of April 14-15, it will offer a brick-and-mortar presence for dozens of small entrepreneurs for as low as $30 a day for a 6 foot square booth. The market will also sell crafts on consignment, and wall space will be available for artists to show and sell their work outside of a gallery setting.

“We won’t be a typical junk market,” says Erin. “We’re cultivating quality sellers, and a variety of goods — we’ll have furniture, housewares, crafters…”

“The more diverse our vendors, the more people we can bring in as customers,” Nathaniel adds.

“We want it to be a market for every age, style, and budget,” says Erin.

Erin and Nathaniel moved to Portland two years ago from Santa Monica, California. They came here, they say, because they were attracted to Portland’s affordability, its potential to grow, and its entrepreneurial culture.

Finding a space large enough and inexpensive enough for their vision was a big challenge, as was the long slog through permitting and financing the new enterprise. “For a new entrepreneur, it was often hard to find the right path through the process,” says Erin. Still, after nearly two years’ worth of groundwork, “at least we know now that we’re really ready. The fun stuff lies ahead.”

The Flea-for-All finally found a home in a former mattress factory between Preble and Elm Streets in Bayside, a former industrial neighborhood that has been the target of City Hall’s economic development initiatives for the past decade. They give their landlord, Tod Dana, a lot of credit for supporting their idea and sharing their entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

The market’s front entrance is just steps away from the western terminus of the new Bayside Trail (Kiley and Baldwin want to offer special incentives to shoppers who arrive by foot or by bike) and the new-ish Trader Joe’s. Bayside Bowl is a block away in the opposite direction. A string of empty lots alongside the trail, where a railroad yard used to be, may soon start sprouting high-rise apartment buildings. And their next-door neighbor is Portland Architectural Salvage, a business that seems to share the recycled-value aesthetic that the Flea-for-All aspires to.

“There’s good growth around here, a lot of potential,” says Erin. “I think we got here at the right time.”

Portland Flea-for-All will be accepting applications from potential vendors on a rolling basis, but if you’re interested in getting in in time for the grand opening weekend in April, you should fill out their handy online application by this Friday, March 16th.

Photo: Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin, founders of Portland Flea-for-All, on the top floor of the future market space. Photo by Christian MilNeil.

A few weekends ago, sociologist Eric Klinenberg published an essay in the Sunday New York Times in which he shared his observations about Americans who live alone (there are more single-person households now than at any other period of history):

“Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.… ”It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction… living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.”

Today is Valentine’s Day—and though many of our holidays don’t look fondly on people who would prefer to be by themselves, this one lays the guilt on particularly thickly. If you live in Portland, though, you’re not alone in being alone.

Many of our one-person households are people over 65, and either widowed or divorced. And Portland is just the place for them! This past fall, AARP magazine highlighted Portland as one of its Top Ten Affordable Cities for Retirement, citing our low cost of living and social opportunities.

And just last week, Men’s Health magazine “undertook a nonpartisan examination of the data on datable citizens: the ratio of single women to single men, the percentage of college-educated women, the percentage of gainfully employed single women (all from the Census), and the number who work out.”

The feminist headline writers at Men’s Health named the report “Where the Babes Are.”  The number one spot for “most eligible women,” according to this demographic analysis, was Washington, DC.

But squeaking in at the #2 spot was none other than Portland, Maine! It must be all of our workout-obsessed AARP readers.

Then again, it might be all the lesbians. The same 2010 Census data that Men’s Health looked at also revealed that Maine has more same-sex couples than all but six states. “South Portland and Portland have become particular hot spots for gay couples, the statistics show, outpacing Boston, Cambridge and other gay-friendly cities,” a Portland Press Herald report revealed.

Side note: gay couples aren’t single, obviously, but something about the presentation of the “Where the Babes Are” report — maybe it was the mudflap girl illustration? — makes me suspect that the quantum statisticians at Men’s Health neglected to do the math to subtract out the population lesbians from their “eligible women” accounting. If so, we may soon find wandering packs of Bros roaming our city, searching in vain for the eligible women, scouring magazine racks for the last precious copies of Maxim…

At any rate, no matter how eligible or single you may be, have a happy Valentine’s Day.

Ballet dancers and machine automation? A reference, perhaps, to the famous Dada film Ballet Mécanique? Nope, just the next networking mashup that is 2 Degrees Portland.

Calling all artists, professionals, entrepreneurs, and locals of all kinds invested in Portland’s creative economy. The place to be this coming Thursday, February 16, is Kepware, 400 Congress Street in Portland. That night, from 5:30-7:30 pm, the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) is sponsoring the first 2 Degrees Portland event of 2012. And dancers from the Portland Ballet will be there previewing excerpts from their upcoming production of Giselle.

If you’re not familiar with MTI, you should be. Since 1999 they’ve been promoting and supporting Maine’s technology sectors with grants and assistance. From start-ups to established innovators, companies throughout Maine—many right here in Portland—have grown and flourished because of MTI. (One of those local companies, by the way, is Kepware itself, a leader in automation software, helping sophisticated machines talk to one another.)

And just what is “2 Degrees Portland”? It’s a year-old program that connects people already living here with those who want to live here, or are newly arrived. As Creative Portland’s Jen Hutchins notes, “One reason people love this community is because it’s two degrees of separation, not six.”

On the 16^th, Portland newcomers will have the opportunity to connect with the creative community, and those who are established here can network with each other.  So, if you’re an engineer or a designer or a chef or an actor or a programmer or a photographer or a scientist or a…  you get the point.  The way to cross-pollinate is 2 Degrees Portland, and the place to do it is at Kepware on February16.

Two weeks ago, environmental activist, author and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, came to the Portland US District courthouse to join a midday demonstration “marking the two-year anniversary of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unprecedented power to fund political campaigns,” according to a story in the Portland Phoenix. “City councilor Dave Marshall recently submitted a resolution that calls on Maine’s congressional delegation to support a constitutional amendment abolishing the so-called ‘corporate personhood’ codified by the ruling. ‘We simply can’t win the battle against carbon if politics remains polluted by corporate money,’ McKibben says.” Dave Marshall’s resolution was indeed passed that Thursday night. The city council of Portland voted 6-2 to call on the state’s congressional delegation to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing “corporate personhood.” [Here's a good roundup of the issue from CommonDreams.org]

McKibben went on to give a lecture that Friday evening at the Westbrook Performing Arts Center hosted by the University of New England entitled, “Local and Global: Notes from the Frontlines of the Climate Fight.” [Here's the video of the talk.] That talk is being broadcast today on MPBN’s Speaking in Maine public affairs program.

Now Portland likes corporations just fine, but we like living and working to be in balance. We like our people to be people and our corporations to be corporations.

In fact, a lot of the companies that are attracted to Maine, and to the Portland area in particular, are trying to create solutions to the kinds of problems McKibben addresses in his most recent book, Eaarth, Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.  ReVision Energy, Ocean Approved Kelp, Ocean Renewable Power, all presented at this year’s Juice 3.0 conference and are all based in Portland. Other Portland green businesses listed on the Maine Businesses for Sustainability include Blue Reserve Water, PDT Architects, Wright-Ryan Construction, and Coffee by Design. A great resource for local services with green practices is the new green business directory from The Sunrise Guide.

McKibben’s talk was Skyped live around the State to Belfast, Bangor, Houlton, and the Portland Public Library. Bill said he has been to all of these places, but this “is a very low carbon way to get around Maine!” He apologized, in advance for being, “a professional bummer-outer of people,” but then went on to tell what we can all do to make things better. He praised Maine’s initiatives in the local food movement and Portland’s permaculture efforts during the 10.10.10 day of action, but he also said we need to do more.

In particular, McKibben thinks that the injection of money into politics is crippling our government’s ability to make any substantive changes in our energy future. ”I gave a little talk at the Portland courthouse today,” he said, “because there was a demonstration to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United thing that sort of opened up fully the money spigots for corporate America to interfere in our political life. And this is just cheating. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, and Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, is caught giving money to the referees beforehand, it’s a national scandal. Everybody would be outraged, but if Exxon does it, then it’s OK. That’s crazy and we’ve got to stop it, right now.”

McKibben speaks from the deep Yankee tradition (see my discussion with Colin Woodard in relation to this). In fact, in 2010 he wrote a series of articles for Yankee Magazine subtitled How New England Can Save the World. And he was clearly speaking to a receptive audience that night in Westbrook, “The thing that keeps us from fixing things is our cynicism. This is how it’s always going to be. We need to be aggressively naive about this. I think we need to say, ‘This is not right, it’s not fair, it makes no sense. We don’t know how it got started, but it’s time to stop it.’ And we won’t stop it perfectly and all at once, but hopefully we can at least throw a scare into them. So we’re going to have people all over the country and they’re going to be following around their congressman with big signs pointing out how much money they’ve taken. And we’re going to be making up suit coats for them that look like those uniforms that nascar drivers wear, with decals, logos, for each of their companies. It’s shameful what’s going on and there needs to be some shaming done.”

Bill is not a naturally outgoing person and he has taken the mantle of activist leader somewhat reluctantly. In many ways, like many creatives, he would rather sit in his room and write. But there’s clearly something about the momentum of social engagement, and 350.orgs surprising victories, that keeps him going. Returning at the end of his talk to the theme of local foods he concluded, ”The secret is to have more fun than other people have, and part of that involves eating delicious, good things close to home, and frankly i think we’ve reached the point that i’m going to stop so I can eat some of them!”